The Church That Refused to Stay Buried

In 1966, Mao Zedong's Red Guards swept through China with a singular mission: destroy every trace of Christianity. They shuttered churches, burned Bibles by the truckload, and marched pastors through the streets in dunce caps. Seminary professors were sent to labor camps. Congregations were scattered. By the mid-1970s, Western observers wrote the Chinese church's obituary. It was, by every visible measure, a valley of dry bones.

Then Mao died in 1976, and the doors cracked open.

What missionaries and journalists found stunned them. The church had not merely survived — it had multiplied. In rural Henan province, in cramped apartments in Shanghai, in living rooms across a thousand villages, millions of believers had been gathering in secret. Elderly women who had memorized entire books of Scripture became the living Bibles that no one could confiscate. House church leaders, some barely out of prison, were baptizing new converts by the hundreds. A faith that appeared utterly dead had grown from roughly one million believers to an estimated ten million — all underground, all without buildings or seminaries or printed Bibles.

This is the God of Ezekiel 37. He stood Ezekiel in a valley littered with bones so dry they had given up even the memory of life, and He asked, "Can these bones live?" The prophet answered cautiously. But the Almighty was not asking permission. He was making a promise. He breathes, and what was dead rises. He speaks, and scattered bones become an army.

No grave has ever held what God intends to raise.